Archive for September 2011

What with Patrick’s post about Scot McKnights new book ‘the King Jesus Gospel’ I thought it might be about time that I asked a long lasting niggling question of mine.

The whole idea that the gospel is ‘Jesus is Lord’ as opposed to the “…existential plan of salvation, detached from the OT and the story of Israel…” has completely blown my mind over the past few years. Since the penny dropped I feel like I’ve been walking around thinking ‘it’s so obvious, why didn’t I see this before?’. “Jesus is Lord” are the most beautiful words.

Anyway as time went on I began to really grab hold of this ‘Jesus is Lord’ message it began to shape my whole life more and more. If Jesus is Lord then it is He who should dictate who I am and what I do. Then I started to think that this is also true for other people. That they should be living their lives as disciples of Jesus and when they weren’t happy with that I would say ‘well I don’t care how you feel…Jesus is LORD! so deal with it… you don’t have a choice.’ I began to use this good news that Jesus is Lord as a stick to beat people with and suddenly it stopped sounding so much like good news.

Then about a month ago, this thought occured to me ‘Jesus was Lord, knew he was Lord, said he was Lord and yet never used it to force people into following him.’ He never said ‘look, just shut up and do as I say ’cause i’m Lord’. Jesus never seemed to use the fact that he is Lord to pull rank on people. At least as far as I can see.